The unsurprising thing is that it works really, really well. The Prohibition-era paradigm shift is similar enough to our own era of ascendant faith to make it relevant. The first scene features Buscemi’s Johnson speaking before a local Temperance group and the environment is as colorful and bannered as a Baptist tent revival. As colorful as Johnson’s life of whoring, dealmaking as the mayor and political boss of New Jersey’s Sin City.

While Nucky Johnson and his complications are the series’ A-story, Prohibition and the fact that Johnson is involved in AC’s bootlegging industry and general criminal enterprise are the show’s B, C and D storylines. Definitely worth catching.

Rating: 4.5 out of 5 stars

For fans of: Carnivale, The Sopranos, Deadwood, Sin City, The Godfather, Steve Buscemi and period HBO Dramas in general

Listen up — Turner and Harron have carefully constructed a four-dimensional portrait of a woman who was, initially, a rather innocent studio model. She was good at what she did, attractive and at ease with her body in a way that made nudity easy. She was many things to many people, even as those fantasies and figments overlapped and contradicted on another.The modelling was so easy, that distortions such as S&M, Fetishism and role-playing were a bit of a joke to her, even as she posed for pictures by the notorious Irving and Paula Klaw.

The Klaws, of course, were a brother-sister team, that ran a mail-order photograpy business, whereby people would send away for stylized ‘artistic’ pictures of  costumed models. The Klaws were *not*. pornographers. But their collaboration was an odd one, with Irving serving as the product manager requesting certain kinds of pictures from his sister Paula, who actually posed and photographed the models.

Finally, this would also seem to be the break-out film that Gretchen Mol was unable to deliver during the 90′s. The girl has serious chops, convincingly becoming the Nashville-born Page as she leaves Tennesee and arrives in NYC, where she becomes “The Pin-Up Queen of the Universe.” One of the film’s most striking story arcs is Bettie’s transformation from Southern Girl to Shakespearian Thesp. The Connecticut-born Mol (b. 1972) convincingly sells us Page’s humble roots, before deconstructing both herself and Page. Looking back, it’s remarkable that the entire thing clocks in at 90 minutes.

See it.

Rating: 4.5 out of 5 stars

If you aren’t aware of the plot, it’s a late, experimental variation on noir, about 2 grifters in the Hustler-Older Woman game. For reasons that seem to make no amount of sense, real life con-artists/lovers Martha Beck and Raymond Fernandez posed as brother and sister during their scams, their schemes allowing the 200-lb. Beck to accompany Hernandez and their target on ‘dates’ as a chaperone up to and after the ‘wedding’.

It’s an odd film, with primitive camera movements, clumsy direction and stilted dialogue. Conversation and character interaction seem to be second-thought here — almost every line is exposition. describing things that are going on off-screen.

The big question is whether the director, Leonard Kastle intended that the performers ‘externalize’ the performances the way they did. In 1969, it might have been seen as revolutionary, but in 2010 it just seems mannered in an unproductive way. If he had done 10 more films like this, it might have amounted to an interesting style, like a Pinter play or Mamet film. But this was Kastle’s only screen credit and this Kastle can’t boast any relation to the other Castle of B-movie fame.

The story of Beck and Hernandez has been remade twice as ‘Deep Crimson‘ (1996) and ‘Lonely Hearts (2006).

Recommended for fans of David Lynch and John Cassavettes

Rating: 3 out of 5 stars

What ‘W.’ does do, is lean upon other, older archetypes — W is the young Prince Hal, trying to get away from his father’s legacy only to reform from his wastrel ways and accept the destiny destiny intended — in George W. Bush’s case — for his younger, smarter brother.

Though .W.’ is meant to illustrate the presidency happening to one George W. Bush, it sadly avoided the 2 or 3 most important things that occurred while Bush was in office — the movie skips around between 1967, 1992 and 2003, there is no mention of 9-11 , Iraq or Afghanistan, no Enron and no bank failures which effectively puts a great, big donut-hole in the middle of this movie.

Instead, Stone’s ‘W.’ characterizes the Bush II Presidency meant as a family-drama where the protagonist tries to overcome the low expectations of his family. What’s not addressesed, in the movie is the damage that he does to the world on the way to besting his father.

When Stone announced that he was doing ‘W.’, it elicited doubts everywhere, given the unflattering accounts he’d created for Nixon, JFK and Reagan via the eponymous and period films –, ‘Platoon’ (1995), ‘The Doors (1991), ‘Born on the Fourth of July’ (1989), ‘Wall Street’ (1987) and ‘Salvador’ (1986).

Josh Brolin does an effective job as Mr. Bush, though I suspect Mr. Bush was far less assertive than he is depicted here. Richard Dreyfuss is a serviceable Cheney, Bruce McGill is a ringer for George Tenet while Geoffrey Wright and James Cromwell each turn in serviceable jobs as Colin Powell and Bush père.

Though Stone probably had no idea of the tailspin that the Middle East and the American economy would take by the time this film was released, it’s clear that this will not be the last Bush II biopic, only the first.

Rating: 2 out of 5 stars

That’s not to say that there aren’t impressive things going on in it — it just seems that my expectations became distorted after what seemed to me an elaborate and meticulous emphasis on direction and production design to refer to European nouvelle vague films that goes entirely nowhere.

In the disk’s promotional blurb, the film is described as a first-hand account of Tianamen Square in Beijung, c. 1989. The film’s writer-director, Lou Ye apparently participated in those protests back in the day, but the film does very little to communicate exactly what those students were after — was it more ‘democracy’? More civil rights? Greater freedom of self-expression?

The film may have been forbidden to cross those thematic threshholds on account of domestic funding, but what Lou Ye starts to create is a visually compelling film that self-consciously references French and Italian cinema of the 1960 only to sputter out when it comes to the Tianamen Square elephant in the middle of the room.

Granted, Summer Palace deals with sexuality with an unexpected frankness that invoked the ire of the Central Committee, but like (forgive me) Michael Bay’s ‘Transformers’ the film’s A and B storylines have *nothing* to do with one another — there is nothing but a superficial relationship between the June 4th Incident and the romantic engagements of the protagonist; the film explores neither subject in any substantive depth.

It’s a shame, really. A film that could have told the West a lot about life in China detourns into an exposition of Yu Hong’s personal life and her sexual liberation — boyfriend, girlfriend, girlfriend, hook-up — rather than give us any concrete appreciation of the historical forces at work in China during the late ’80′s. It’s particularly disappointing that the film failed to deliver it’s central narrative because Ye’s set-up — and the degree to which she ‘quotes’ films like ‘Jules and Jim‘ (1962) and ‘The Bicycle Thief‘ (1948) get entirely lost when she shifts the focus of the story to Ye’s sexual diarism.

When deliberate quotes are made to other movies, they should, IMHO, be incorporated into the plot and not just be used to demonstrate the creators’ historical knowledge.

I lost interest in the film as it shifted from the concerns of the ’60′s-cum-’80′s comparison of Europe’s 1968 and China’s Cultural Revolution to place Yu Hong and her friends as ex-pats in Berlin after 2000. The central effects of Tianamen Square failed to pay off. The sudden shift to Berlin and Yu’s ultimate repatriation sell the film short given the attention that had been spent on the music and production design of the film’s early scenes.

Then again, meybe I just need to watch the film’s bonus materials and acquaint myself better with contemporary Chinese history.

Rating: 2 out of 5 stars

The week before I saw ‘Charlie Wilson’, I had watched ‘Nineteen Eighty-Four‘ again, only to discover what seemed to be a waterboarding administered to Winston by O’Brien.

The past is prologue.

Imagine then, my synesthetic confusion when 1983′s chart-topper “Let’s Dance” came over the speakers — all of the props were in place — ‘Charlie Wilson’ is the story of an un-person, Democratic Congressman left out of the public record even as the Republican Party has claimed proprietary ownership of Communism’s defeat. Based on the eponymously titled book by former 60 Minutes producer George Crile, ‘Charlie Wilson’s War’ recounts Mr. Wilson’s effort to defeat the Soviets in Afghanistan.

In 1984, I was also a junior in high school, choking down Orwell’s complete body of work and fair measure of dystopian British fiction – Anthony Burgess’ A Clockwork Orange, Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World and a good few Philip K. Dick novels. Even as the year 1984 came and went I wondered if the world that Orwell decribed had, in fact, arrived unbeknownst to everybody alive at that moment.

Lo, and behold, history was re-written before our eyes as it was Ronald Reagan that took credit for ending the Cold War by outspending the Soviet military budget. What has been left out of the ‘official’ history is Charlie Wilson’s role on the front-line of that conflict.

Based on the eponymous George Crile book, ‘Charlie Wilson’s War’ recounts the political career of the Honorable Charles Nesbitt Wilson (1933- ), who served in the U.S. Congress for 24 years, spanning the Carter, Reagan, Bush 41 and Clinton Administrations, and served 16 of those years on the Defense Appropriations Subcommittee, earmarking funds for the CIA’s ‘black bag operations throughout Central America and the Middle East.

No stranger to fast-living, liquor and controvery, Wilson apparently had an epiphany while sitting in a Vegas hot-tub with a pair of showgirls. A consummate public servant, Wilson was distracted from his hot-tub by a 60 Minutes segment , where Dan Rather reported on Russian incursions into Afghanistan. As a fervent anti-Communist, and a member of the Defense Appropriations Subcommittee, Wilson saw a funding opportunity in the Afghani Mujahideen.

<iframe src=”http://rcm.amazon.com/e/cm?t=cineblogus-20&o=1&p=8&l=as1&asins=0802141242&fc1=000000&IS2=1&lt1=_blank&lc1=0000FF&bc1=FFFFFF&bg1=FFFFFF&f=ifr” style=”width:120px;height:240px;” scrolling=”no” marginwidth=”0″ marginheight=”0″ frameborder=”0″ align=”right”></iframe>Of course, the Mujahideen were absorbed by the forces of light, once Ronald Reagan heard of them, but by that time Wilson (played by Tom Hanks) and his CIA attaché, Gust Avrokotos (Philip Seymour Hoffman) increased foreign appropriations for the Afghani ‘freedom fighters’ from $5 million to $750 million a year during the ’80′s. Through Wilson and the efforts of his sometime-mistress, Texas Socialite Joanne Herring (Julia Roberts), the US funneled weapons to Afghanistan, creating a Vietnam-like quagmire for the Soviets on the other side of the Black Sea. The billions of dollars that the Russians sank into Afghanistan invariably helped collapse of the Berlin Wall and the end of the Cold War in 1989.

Politics aside, there is actual entertainment to be found in ‘Charlie Wilson’s War’. Rather that take the easy route and lampoon the New World Order pontifications of the Republican Administrations that Wilson served, Sorkin uses the opportunity to make art. Between the progress of the Mujahideen and Wilson’s back-room deals, Sorkin and Nichols have fashioned an old-fashioned Capra-esque movie.

Hanks’ Wilson is a fairly serviceable imitation of Jimmy Stewart , while Roberts seems to channel Barbara Stanwyck in either ‘Executive Suite‘ or ‘Meet John Doe‘. And just to make sure you know what kind of movie you’re watching, Sorkin and Nichols have peppered their film with numerous door gags, rapid-fire dialogue and a few trademark Sorkin walk-and-talks.

The productive ingredients here are Hanks’ and Roberts’ willingness to play character roles, rather than the soppy, Libtard heroism stuff that they’ve become accustomed to.

This one gets five stars for the willingness to tell a relevant story and the effort they’ve taken to tell it as an old-fashioned Hollywood yarn. Usually such efforts make me suspicious, but in Sorkin’s hands it’s a marvelous piece of restraint.

It’s not always the guy on the white horse that’s the hero — sometimes it’s just the paper-pusher who makes the funds available for the revolution.

Unfortunately, Universal chose to dump ‘Charlie Wilson’ into release four days before Christmas, denying it the attention of the broadest possible audience. But it *is* on the Oscar, Bafta and Golden Globe short-lists and remains in theaters 6 weeks after it opened. Try to see it while it’s still in theaters!

Rating: 5 out of 5 stars

Based on the work of author JT LeRoy a/k/a Laura Albert and her fictional male childhood in the itinerant trailer-parks of West Virginia. Back in 1996, LeRoy became something of an overnight sensation, after the publication of several stories and two subsequent novels, ‘Sarah’ (1999) and ‘The Heart is Deceitful of All Things’ in 1999. But JT LeRoy does not exist.

Like James Frey’s ‘A Million Little Pieces‘, ‘Heart’ is a piece of fiction dreamed up by an author with an assumed identity, who sold her book as biography. In this case, JT LeRoy was allegedly a young man from West Virginia, the son of a negligent hooker, who somehow broke loose of his mother to peddle his ass throughout the South, before washing up in San Francisco to become the protege of writers Laura Albert and Geoffrey Knoop. That said, the homosexual child-rape, forced transvestism and incest in the book never happened. Argento bought the book rights in or around 2000, while JT was the toast of the hipster literati, being toasted by celebrities like Winona Ryder, Marilyn Manson and Peter Fonda, before being revealed as a hoax in the October 2005 issue of New York Magazine in an expose written by Stephen Beachy. It is unknown whether Argento and here producers were aware of the hoax during the film’s production.

That said, the fabrications and assumed identities in this film quickly become layered, whether or not one knows about the film’s provenance.

Argento as Sarah, the underaged white-trashy mother of young Jeremiah initially seemed to be something of a mistake if one were trying to sell this movie as a biopic. But as subversion, Argento’s casting choices are ingenious. As an homage to perverse and sexually confused Italian Cinema of the ’60′s and ’70′s, it works perfectly – with two dark-skinned Italian actresses in leading roles (Ornella Muti makes an appearance as Sarah’s mother), the film dovetails as an homage to Pier Paolo Pasolini‘s body of work, one that frequently featured the struggles of teenage male prostitutes trying to make ends meet on the streets of Rome.

Whether or not Argento was aware of Abbott’s ‘JT Leroy’ deception at the time she scripted ‘Deceitful’ is almost irrelevant; ‘Deceitful’ is a thoughtful piece of work that plays as horror, tragedy and comedy – a David Lynch-meets-Pasolini sort of thing for those in search of a different kind of date-movie.

Highly recommended for those who had to suffer ‘Salo’ in either grad or undergraduate film school.

Rating: 3.5 out of 5 stars

Documentarian Keven McAllester does a satisfying enough job of tracking Erikson’s youth and early music career, before arresting his musical inquiry to dive into a disquisition on the singer’s mental illness and the 17 years he floated in and out of Texas’ Mental Health Care system and the care of friends and family.

Apparently, Erikson discovered LSD in the early ’70′s and it triggered some nascent schizophrenia that Erikson had been walking around with his entire life. At this point – the 20 or 30 minute mark – the film becomes a bit too much like Terry Zwigoff’s ‘Crumb‘ (1994) and the filmmakers take too much of an interest in Erikson’s schizophrenia, twenty years of institutionalization and his eccentric family, specifically his Mother Evelyn and his brother, Sumner. And this is where the documentary seems to go wrong.

If the movie was meant to be a proper portrait, the filmmakers ought to have spent more time on the music that Erikson made and the influence he has had, given that most people have likely never heard of The Elevators or recognize the influence that they had on American music, an influence that trickled into Jefferson Airplane or that of their sometime-collaborator, fellow Texan Janis Joplin.

A case for Erikson and the Elevators’ influence could easily be made, given that they were the first psychedelic rock band. Current scholarship links the Elevators to Michael Stipe and R.E.M., The Jesus and Mary Chain and ZZ Top, while missing the likely influence they had upon acts like The Velvet Underground, Jefferson Airplane, Patti Smith, the Talking Heads and the American ‘Punk’ and ‘Emo’ movements during the ’70′s, ’80′s and ’90′s. Instead, it seems as though director Keven McAlester and his producers, Laura Boyd DeSmeth and Lauren Hollingsworth would rather use Erikson’s story as a springboard to discuss the inequities and difficulties of mental health care here in America, as they go into the homes of Roky, his mother and brother, to reveal some shocking details about the disorders each of them seem to share.

The filmmakers then wrap-up their story create an inaccurate ‘happy’ ending, by depicting a middle-aged Erikson, moving from a State mental facility to the custody and Guardianship roles that have been given to his brother Sumner. What the filmmakers conveniently omit from their coverage is that Erikson has maintained something of a music career since 1995, despite his institutionalization. As part of his role as Roky’s legal guardian, brother Sumner has encouraged his brother to continued playing and organized an annual annual Ice Cream Social in their native Austin and that Roky has largely weaned himself of the many psychiatric medications he was dependent upon while he was a ward of the State.

In this case, I wish the filmmakers had spent more time in the film talking about Erikson and his musical influence, rather than the Jerry Springer-style evocation of American Mental Health care and the traps that it creates. Though Erikson was a victim of that system it is neither the beginning or end of his story.

Rating: 3 out of 5 stars